author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

World Horror Convention 2007 is over now, bar the drinking. And there's still a good deal of drinking going on, if the population of the hotel lounge is any indication. By all accounts, it's been a good WHC.

"Captain Hook" finally got some peer review here. I hadn't planned on it, actually, but when I arrived Saturday at the Twilight Tales Open Mic critique session, intending to be part of the audience, I was immediately accosted with, "So are you gonna sign up?" with a clear subtext of do, please! And I thought, well, I do have something appropriate...

Boy, howdy, was that a good thing. I mean, right up front, it was educational, that crawling in my stomach as I realized I was reading aloud three whole pages of exposition to an audience more patient than the story deserved. But had I read it aloud alone, I probably would have just come away with "Yes, that's a heavily front-loaded story. I need to cut that." What I got from this critique session was much more concrete: which three sentence clauses of the exposition were actually needed, where to put them, and then how to collapse this scene with that character dynamic to improve the whole immensely. Eric Cherry deserves a round of kudos for being such a swell critic. He MC'd the events and acted as critique facilitator, leading off the discussion with his exceedingly insightful comments.

I was relieved to hear that the ending worked. Reactions ranged from "I didn't see that coming" to "I saw it coming and I hoped it wouldn't happen." This is a very good thing. It's always a good thing when the critiques reaffirm your own assessment of which bits succeed and which bits need work. It's also good when you can make an audience of veteran horror readers flinch.

Later that night I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest. I didn't place this year, but I didn't expect to. The story I read had only been written over the past couple of days, after all. Simply that I produced new fiction in time to perform it Saturday night made me feel proud of myself.

Today and Friday (once I arrived) were more relaxed. Attended a panel here and there (in addition to his other stellar qualities, Mort Castle is a brilliant panel moderator), stuck my head in at a few parties, ate out a little, saw a very small corner of Toronto with my very own eyes. Did a little knitting show-n-tell with fellow stitchers (including the designer of the dread Knithulhu!). Today, a local couple (the Knithulhu designer and her husband) led me via street car and subway to an excellent Irish pub at King and Brant Streets. I wish I could have seen more of this city, but I don't wish it enough to exchange my Amtrak tickets for a later date and check into a hostel. I'm ready to go home. I feel like I've been traveling non-stop, even though I've been in the same place since Friday night. I'm missing my husband and our cats and our home and the coffee house down the street. I guess there's a limit to how long I can drift before I get antsy.

Getting on the Maple Leaf tomorrow morning at 8:30. Should be in Denver by the same hour on Wednesday. Might check in on Tuesday morning from Chicago. If not, I'll say hi when I get home.

Hello! I'm in Chicago. I didn't expect to be here at 4:30 PM on Thursday the 29th--I quite expected to be on Amtrak's Maple Leaf line headed for the Canadian border--but them's the freight. I mean, the breaks.

It occurred to me that although I've been blogging up a storm at Metroblogging and Burnzpost, I haven't said much over here in a while. Um. There are reasons. I won't say what they are, because I don't want to disturb any assumptions you might have about them being good reasons. Just you go on thinking that, eh?

Anyway, my pirate story won't be in Shimmer's pirate issue. The rejection letter was complimentary. I don't know whether JJA uses form email letters like he does snail-mail ones. If so, this was the "nice writing but didn't ultimately work for me" one. Which isn't a bad thing.

So "A Wish For Captain Hook" will get in the rewrite queue, right behind all the other short stories waiting to be rewritten. I'm-a gonna be working on that whilst riding the rails. A sort of mobile writing retreat, see. No internet means no Puzzle Pirates to distract me! Yarr! Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to uninstall Spider Solitaire, and it's amazing how addictive that gets when there's other things I should be doing.

How many people bring a printer onboard an Amtrak superliner and set up a mobile office in coach? I mean, really? Can't be that many. People stared a bit.

When next I update, it'll be from the World Horror Convention in Toronto. At which I shall be arriving a day later than planned. Darn it. But for the record, Amtrak treats its "distressed passengers" very well. The hotel was quite posh.

If you happen to live at 4335 Lake Villa Drive in Metairie, Louisiana, I promise this isn't personal. The fictional kids in my fictional story just happen to live on your nonfictional block, that's all. I just popped addresses into Google Maps until I got sort of the house I was envisioning, et voila.

I didn't want to set the story on the street where I grew up. That seemed too easy. Plus I've done it before. So I hit on using the piece of Lake Pontchartrain I'm next most familiar with: the area by the Suburban Canal. I rode my bike down there countless times as a teenager, sometimes hanging out under the gazebo with my writing notebook and my headphones, sometimes just tossing french fries to the seagulls. I guess I could have had my two fictional kids hanging out on the sea wall by the Bonnabel Boat Launch, but it's too late now. I've worked on the story long enough that, dammit, they live where they live, and trying to pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

Sometimes pieces of a story get ossified like that; they're no longer up for debate because that's the way it happened. What began as fiction sort of calcifies into, if not exactly reality, than an idea that my thought processes treat as reality. Katrina happened in '05, the New Orleans Saints won their Divisional Championship in '06, and Louise and Jimbo live on the first block of Lake Villa south of West Esplanade. I know one of those things isn't true, but my thoughts make room for it just as though it were no less factual than the other two.

Anyway... If you happen to live in the area, dear reader, I wouldn't mind knowing how your neighborhood fared. The story is set during November/December '05, and I want to be at least semi-faithful to what really happened. Was it like my parents' block, where all the damage came from holes in roofs, not flood? Was the street pretty empty during the months following, or did people come home fairly quickly? I didn't see too much full-body devastation last time I took a bike ride up Lake Villa from the pumping station to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, but then that was December '06 and all sorts of restoration could have happened since. And when did all that construction at the pumping station start? It's not the safe-house I'm talking about; that's done. It's all the cranes digging up huge chunks of levee that I mean. And when was that sea wall built in front of the mouth of the canal? I know it wasn't there when I was in high school some 15 years ago. How do you even begin Googling for that kind of information? Think the Jefferson Parish Library can help? They can certainly tell me about branch closures and reopenings after the storm, at least. Maybe I should check the NOLA.com message boards, or ask around the comment sections at Metroblogging New Orleans.

If you have info and feel like sharing, the email link is at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Yes, it's a pop-up web form. I'm sorry. Deal with it.

Just a quickie this morning before I get to work. I reread Peter Pan last week. Memory is fallible, and I wanted to have the canonical text fresh in my head. Specifically, I couldn't remember what the Lost Boys wore exactly. Turns out their wore bear skins.

Other things I discovered:

• I had unwittingly given the baby brother the same first name as Captain Hook--must address so as not to make this look like a cutsy authorial fiat.
• There is a lot of violence on Neverland. I'd remembered that. I hadn't remembered exactly how very much of a lot of violence, and how callous the children are about it.
• Dude! Siblings as surrogate mothers! Duh.

That's all. Off to finish the draft now. Ta.

Dude! I know where the quill is! And I know what it does!

It came to me on the bus Wednesday night--I was using the hour-long bus ride between Boulder and Denver to get my daily 2K written. I was working on the scene with the one sympathetic family in the neighborhood, the one that actually tried to bring abuse charges against one of the missing kids' parents. The family comes to visit and they have a bit of a pow-wow. Well, the mom is more prepared to trust Gwen than the dad is, mainly because she grew up in the neighborhood too (so why doesn't she already know Gwen? Must think about this), but she wants to make sure Gwen really does have a history with The Bookwyrm's Hoard.

So she tells a story about Mrs. Nimbel and the quill, and she gently challenges Gwen to tell one of her own:

"...Anyway, I stormed out the house and came here. Like always. And Mrs. Nimbel said--" I could still hear her voice, surprisingly agile and sly, her voice "--she said, 'Gwen, what's with the glumsickle you're sucking on? Get over here and spit it out.'"

Cindy gave a little peal of laughter. "What's with that glumsickle, Mommy?" Dierdre patted her hand and favored her with a cautious smile.

"So I told her. And she did get out that quill, didn't she? A peacock's wing feather fitted with a brass wide-tip nib. And she made me tell her a question, just like you said. 'Do I have to be a doctor?' That's what I asked."

"And then what?"

Ron's voice made me jump. I hadn't been expecting him to get into the story. I looked up at him and said, "Well, I flung myself onto this sofa here, all dramatic-like, and I grabbed a magazine. I paged through it, got caught up in the articles, and after a while I reached the back cover and there was Mrs. Nimbel standing there with the paper in her hands. I read the question out loud back to myself, and what came out of my mouth, immediately, was, 'No. I have other obligations.' And then I just--like this--clapped my hand over my mouth, and said through my fingers, 'What the hell does that mean?'"

And I know where it is. That came to me too. I know where it is, why it got there, and how it's going to get found. It has also occurred to me that the thug's message about the parents wanting the bookstore gone isn't entirely a red herring. At least one parent is connected with the evil corporate mastermind guy, but it's not why I thought. It's much darker than that.

That I'm not going to reach THE END by 50K has nothing to do with plot after the Bookwyrm's grand opening. It has to do with how much plot is required in order to reach the grand opening.

I am in fact on Martha's Vineyard, in the middle of the Viable Paradise, and things are splendid. The latest freelance deadline has been met, albeit less satisfactorily than I would like. I have taken a flight lesson out of the Katama Airporrt in a red Citabria--taildraggers are fun! I have biked all over most of the east end of the island. I've seen glowing jellyfish. And the first three chapters of Drowning Boy have been critqued by four different instructors and five different students, and I am simultaneously encouraged to stick with the story and disappointed in my draft so far.

Summary of average verdict: Beginning moves too slowly, main character's too passive, mermaid worldbuilding is just fine but author needs to trust it more and not be so cagey about it, and don't wreck it by overdoing the whole Descent of Inanna thing--oh, and medical emergency airplane diversions don't in and of themselves cause media frenzy, but medical emergencies mistaken for terrorist scares might.

Today, Tuesday, I had my second one-on-one critique. With Teresa Nielsen Hayden. (Pause for fangirl *gasp* and *wheeze*) I told her how I feel embarrased by the synopsis of my novel--"makes me realize I've written something I can't show my mother, at least not until it's published." She just smiled, flipped over page 1 of the synopsis, and wrote on the back, "CERTIFICATE: That's OK, it's Art." And she signed it. "You are officially given permission," she said.

That piece of paper is totally going up on the file cabinet next to my writing desk.

Also, she wants me to try, just as an excercise, using the Evil Overlord button to liven up my synopsis. I told her I'll turn it in tomorrow. ("You fool!" said my roommate. "Aren't I," said I.)

What else? Oh. Right. OK, so, in addition to being in the middle of the best writing workshop I have ever attended in my life, and being in awe at conversing daily with people who publish short stories in F&SF and people who edit for Tor and people who inspire reverence everywhere they turn up online--in addition to all that, I say, as though all that needed adding too--I have a new blog.

That's right! One I get paid to do! And one which it won't turn out the editor wants me to pretend to be a porn star at! Bonus!

It's over here.

Right. That's all I've got for now. I should sleep. I consumed far more alcohol than is my norm this evening, between James D. Macdonald's Maker's Mark and extra special rum and Bill Boyke's stash of Glenmorangie and super-fine potato vodka and Teresa Nielsen Hayden's so-called "scurvy cure" which also involves vodka... Two ibuprofin and a tall glass of water better be enough, that's all I'm saying.

Also, the satisfactory conclusion of the bikini experiment.

Saturday: John and I discovered Maui Public Transit. We also discovered that the Westin staff are somewhat reticent about this. "No, we don't have a schedule for the bus--but we have a great free shuttle!" Thank you, but we're hoping to actually get out of Ka'anapali. Ka'anapali is beautiful, but I am told there is more to Maui than the various hotels and timeshare resorts lined up along the beach here.

In fact, there's the town of Lahaina. John and I spent some time wandering up and down Front Street. It's a bit touristy, but we managed to find the Old Lahaina Bookstore. Also the library.

Sunday: We woke up at 1:30 AM and stumbled downstairs to await the Maui Downhill van. Today was our day to view sunrise from atop Mt. Haleakala and then coast all the way down! Alas, when Maui Downhill hears "Westin Ka'anapali" they think, for some reason, we mean the Westin Maui Spa & Resort rather than the Westin Ka'anapali Ocean Resort Villas. This should have been trivial to correct, but what with the ongoing brush fire outside Ma'alaea and all the attendant smoke, radio communication was futzed. And the drivers don't have cell phones. Why don't the drivers have cell phones?!

We rescheduled for Monday and went back to sleep. We managed to sleep through the very thing we'd lamented scheduling the Maui Downhill trip against: the weekly Lahaina Craft Fair. Dammit.

Later that afternoon: More wandering about Lahaina. The discovery that Cheeseburger In Paradise does gardenburgers. Also, a visit to the Chinese Museum and Taoist Temple on Front Street.

Monday: Another 1:30 AM wake-up. And the van showed up this time! Yay! Our driver and our tour guide were both absolutely wonderful, but they insisted on playing Sheryl Crow on the drive up to the top of the mountain. Discovering the rest of the album was detrimental to my already minimal appreciation of the artist. I'd have preferred that Presidents Of The United States Of America album that the tour guide had on him.

We were about an hour atop the mountain. Stargazing was excellent; a breathtaking amount of twinklies were visible, and we even got a shooting star. Sunrise was just as lovely as advertised. The crater is just as immense. And the summit just as cold.

We got to check out the observatory higher up the mountain and admire the rare spectacle of a Silversword plant in bloom. Those things live anywhere between 2 and 50 years, and they bloom only once. They have very shallow root systems, too; we were told not to walk off the path for fear of unknowingly damaging them.

Our tour guide told us all sorts of interesting things about Maui. For instance, pineapple farming is a dying art on that island because, apparently, Del Monte and Dole are taking their operations off to the Philippines. They don't like the expense of paying their workers a fair wage under U. S. labor laws, see. What they have to pay hourly in Hawaii they would only have to pay daily elsewhere.

/me makes mental note not to buy Del Monte or Dole pineapples ever again; from now on it's Maui Gold if I can get it.

Also, sugar cane. It's a grass. They plant it any which way, no walkable rows necessary, and then when it's time to harvest, they set it on fire. "That fire you see off to the left," our tour guide told us in the pre-dawn hours, "it's not the brush fire you've been hearing about. It's a sugar cane field, and the burn is planned and controlled." Apparently, the fire causes the sugar cane to pull up all its juices from the roots and into the stalks as a defense mechanism--the wetter it is, the less it burns. So there's more sugar in the stalks, and what's more, the fire causes it all to get a little carmelized, giving it a texture akin to molasses. Then the stalks are sent to the one remaining sugar mill on Maui (another dying agricultural art there), where "sugar in the raw" type stuff is produced. To get white sugar, this raw output is sent to the mainland and milled further and bleached and sent back to Maui to sell at about $1.50 extra per pound over mainland prices. Yay commerce!

Apparently the reason Maui has remained so agricultural, instead of going all condo, is the Baldwin Piano Company. The Baldwin family/estate consider Maui their pet project. Viva.

The ride down the mountain took us through several different environments. At one point there was cloud on the road--the peak of Mt. Haleakala is above the clouds. At another, there were cattle practically on the road, making a very irritated "muuaaaawww!" noise. Our noses got treated to the scents of eucalyptus groves, a lavender farm, and white ginger flowers. Finally we ended up at a little roadside cafe and general store for breakfast. John had french toast, I had a breakfast burrito, and for later I bought a jar of mango chutney and a bag of handmade coconut candy. That coconut candy was good.

Back at the hotel, we napped a lot, getting up in time to go to a luau at the resort two doors down--"Myths and Legends," I think it was called, hosted by the Royal Lahaina. We got in kinda cheap by reserving with Boss Frog's, but when offered an even deeper discount if we agreed to attend a timeshare salesman's presentation, we demurred. Time is precious, after all. An hour and a half spent listening to a sales pitch is an hour and a half not doing something delightful and vacation-y. Like, say, sleeping, or playing another round or two of "The Mysteries Of Horus" on my computer.

We walked along the beach until we got to what looked like the right resort, and then squiggled a bit to find our way to the proper entrance. The band was playing ukelele-and-yodelling music--I had thought ukeleles and yodelling were just an unfair stereotype, but no, this is actual Hawaiian music. "On the Island," sang the band, "we do it Island Style, from the mountains to the beaches, from the windward to the leeward side." They sang the words in something remarkably like an Irish accent, and the tune was suspiciously similar to the Kinks' "Come Dancing."

The buffet was yummy. I had extra helpings of all the meat items: coconut-crusted mahi mahi, teriyaki-style steak, and the traditional pulled "Kalua Pork" which was ready far too soon after the men displayed the pit-smoked pig carcass for all to see. I suspect they serve today's pig tomorrow. There were also complimentary drinks of both the soft and mixed variety, which the nice man gave us each two of after we'd made our selections. I only drank one of my Mai-Tais, though. After that I switched to coffee.

The hostess was lovely, but would have fit in equally well at a Las Vegas lounge or on a cruise-ship. "A-loooooooooooow-ha!" she sighed at the audience, and waited for us to holler it back. ("When she says 'Aloha' that way," I wondered to John, "is it Hawaiian for the Animaniacs' trademark 'Helloooooooo Nurse'?") When she sang traditional songs she sounded lovely; when she sang lounge lizard songs, she got all hoarse and breathy and sounded like she oughtn't to sing at all. She led an extremely Protestant Christian style prayer before the buffet ("this we pray in Your Precious Name, Amen") as though to ask Yahweh forgiveness ahead of time for the glorifying of the heathen traditions of the Tahitian, Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Samoan cultures that was to come, and she described every dance and song whether modern or traditional in terms of love and romance and whatnot. But the dances were worth watching, and I could kind of imagine what actual religious or ceremonial function some of them might have served.

/me makes mental note to better plan visits to sacred sites and exploration of pre-Christian island religious practices next visit.

At long last, at the end of the luau, there were fire dances. John specifically wanted to see fire dances. Aside from the one man performing Samoan-style with the double-ended staff, all the fire dancing was a little pedestrian compared to some of the really spectacular stuff I'd seen at my sister-in-law's housewarming party the other month (and no doubt compared to what was going on this past weekend at Burning Man), but the fact that just about every dancer in the luau cast was doing something fiery was worth applauding.

Tuesday: Recovering from yesterday. Sleeping late, playing more computer games. John decided that what he needed was a manicure, so we sought the concierge's assistance in acquiring this. There was no salon at the Villas, but we were welcome to go to the Westin Maui. Which we did. John went to his 3:45 appointment while I lounged in the courtyard with a pineapple ice and teased the parrots. Both the cockatoo and the blue-and-yellow macaw named Bob could say "Hello!" "Hi!" and "Aloha!" Bob also knew how to wave hello, but I'm afraid that, with his left wing bobbing about above his head, he looked like a particularly uncoordinated person patting his head and trying hard to figure out where, in that rhythm, to fit in the tummy-rubbing.

The lady from the cafe who had turned pineapple chunks into the icecream-like substance I'd just eaten picked a macaw feather out of the bushes and handed it to me. "So are you waiting on a room?"

"No, on my husband. He's in the salon having a manicure."

This made her laugh, a bit too much I thought. You know, the way people laugh a little too big when you've just said something that made them uncomfortable? It had something in common with the doubletake the salon staff gave us when we assured them that yes, it was just him, not me, nothing for me, thanks, I'll be in the bar.

Around that time the swan came up to me and warbled like a puppy, or like one of the Three Stooges ("woo-woo-woo-woo!"), in hopes that I'd throw her some bread. And a flamingo, deciding it was on the wrong side of the lagoon, ran across the water with its wings flapping madly to get to the other side.

John came swimming with me today. Yay! I'd been trying to get a little ocean dipping in every sundown, but this was his first time joining me. We swam a little off the beach outside the Westin Maui, and then a little bit more back at the Villas, "because," as I told him, "you've got to check out these neat weird fingers of volcanic rock that start just a few feet out there. You can stand on them and everything."

(Those of you who know Ka'anapali Beach can stop laughing now. I hadn't bought goggles yet, what did I know?)

Wednesday: Lahaina again. Labor Day weekend done, the library would be open. Also, there's this century-old banyan tree in the Courthouse yard that's worth seeing. It looks like a forest, but it is, in fact, one tree. Banyans have a similar problem to live oaks: they make very big, very heavy branches that need support. Live oaks solve this by letting the branches dip until they rest on the ground before reaching upwards again. Banyans, apparently, solve this instead by sending down liana-like roots to form a supporting column that looks like a brand new tree, especially when the roots come down from a higher tier of branches and totally engulf a section of branch below. And, as branches do when you tie a rope around them, the banyan branches below grow into and around the roots coming down from above until it's just one solid mass of tree.

The sign said "No climbing." Dammit.

Also, lunch at The Blue Lagoon, whose pineapple fried rice has won an award at the Taste of Lahaina event, which we were one weekend too early to attend. Great stuff. But by now I was starting to get sores in the corners of my mouth from all the unaccustomed tropical fruit.

Today we wandered off of Front Street and through the residential neighborhoods, and found ourselves at the historic old fort/jail at Prison and Waine'e Streets. Outside the huge coral wall, an ancient Model-T and an iron cooking vat have been left to rust away to nothing, but signs posted next to them invite passers-by to appreciate them while they remain in recognizeable shape. The huge ship's anchor was doing better, having been built to withstand the sea water. Inside the courtyard was a mango tree, with ripe mangos just lying all about the place. I picked one up. Bird noises that were not myna birds or doves were emanating from behind the tree, so I headed back there and discovered the jail birds. Four parrots--one green and three gray--in a big cage, all of them yelling "Hello!" at us and squawking. After watching them for a bit, I started slicing up the mango and handing them slices, which they accepted gravely and with great decorum. When the mango was all done, I tossed the seed into the cage and we started to leave.

"BYE!" yelled the parrots. "BYE!"

Thursday: Today we left our habitual stomping grounds and caught an extra bus into Ma'alaea so we could visit the Aquarium. The Aquarium has an awesome reef exhibit with lots of neat fish in it and all sorts of educational plaques. It has a shark exhibit, too, and a guy who swims with the sharks. There's a tide pool exhibit where you can touch, gently, the starfish and the sea urchins. And there's an expensive but delicious restaurant with a kick-ass seafood salad and a signiture bloody mary mix that involves at least half a bottle of tobasco per glass.

We let one bus go because we wanted to bop around the harbor shops for a bit. Five minutes later we had seen it all and regretted letting the bus go. An hour later, we realized that there is no bus back to Lahaina at 1:50 and we'd have to wait another hour. During that time, I finally finished knitting the top half of my bikini experiment, which you can see in the pictures above. I am happy to say that once we got back to the Villas and I surf-tested the bikini top, it withstood everything from freestroke to being dragged across the sand by a particularly violent wave without ever baring my boobies (such as they are). Next time I try out this pattern, I might increase a bit more from the bra line to the bust, and I'll probably use #3 needles for a tighter guage to better avoid nipples peeking through. But, imperfections regardless, I've still got a functional bikini top. Yay!

We got a rainbow that afternoon. We got rainbows practically every afternoon. "Tuesdays, Thursdays, and some Saturdays," John had joked when we saw our first one on Saturday while riding the bus home from Lahaina. Thanks to the near-constant low-lying clouds over the western mountain, which seem the reason for the rainforest in the 'Iao Valley, he turned out to be 100% correct.

The day before, John and I had bought goggles from the general store. After the photo shoot with the bikini top, I put those goggles on and took a closer look at what I'd thought were "fingers of volcanic rock." They turned out to be actual living coral reef, complete with all the little bright-colored fishies from the Aquarium's "upper reef" exhibit. Including the round brown one with the bright blue snout and the orange bands around his lower half. And there were anemonae in the cracks! I am never stepping on those "rocks" with my bare feet again!

Friday: Up at 4:00. Why? Because the moon was full. Beautiful time to go swimming.

Rented a car. Drove up to 'Iao Valley State Park. Saw the 'Iao Needle, the botanical gardens, the exhibits commemorating the different peoples to immigrate to Maui, and a heck-a-lot of highway. Had lunch at Marco's, the very place we had dinner while waiting for Highway 30 to open up a week ago. And had a flight lesson which involved four touch-and-gos at Hana and a lot of picture taking.

With a few more hours to kill before our flight off the island, we took the flight instructor's advice and wandered off to Pa'ia... where we just happened to bump into a high school classmate of mine: Daniel Sullivan. Last I heard, he was being a professional photographer in Afghanistan. Now he owns a shop called Indigo, which specializes in Indian imports and displays a wall full of his photography. Apparantly, if you own a shop on Maui, the world comes to you; a couple months ago, another of our classmates, Geoffery, wandered through, too. We exchanged highly summarized versions of what we'd been up to since graduating Country Day in '94; we exchanged Katrina stories (another one of our classmates, Warren, whose mother keeps in better touch with a lot of the class of '94 than its actual students do, only discovered that someone had been camped out in his house when he saw the "squatter" wearing Warren's football shirt on the National Geographic documentary); we exchanged web page addresses.

So that was extremely cool.

We also got propositioned by a marijuana salesman on Baldwin Beach, and we had tofu stir-fry and excellent sushi at a bistro a couple of blocks down.

And then we headed to the airport, where I had to give up the mango and dragonfruit I'd hoped to eat on the plane, because agricultural restrictions go both ways.

/me makes mental note to chop the fruit up and put it in a jar next time, as canned fruit appears to be A-OK.

John and I are on Maui. To be precise, we're in the town of Ka'anapali, just north along the shore from Lahaina. To get here, you follow highway 30 (the Honoapi'ilani Highway) clockwise around the south shore from the bay. This can be complicated if, for instance, the mountain is on fire. We arrived at Kaluhui Airport at 6:30 PM yesterday afternoon to find the highway had been closed; we had dinner and then found the highway had been reopened--partially; and we sat in a taxi in traffic for 3 hours before checking into the Westin Ka'anapali Ocean Villas at, depending on which of us two you ask, 12:30 or 1:00 AM.

Someone on the radio said of the fire, "They're saying it looks like you're on the big island watching the lava come down the mountain." It did. The entire edge of mountain was glowing with flames and embers. Burning trees looked like being lit up for Christmas. We got a nice long look at the devastation, waiting in traffic to reach the partially blocked stretch of Hwy 30.

So it will probably surprise no one that I did not, in fact, finish and submit a rewrite of "Snowflakes". I meant to finish the rewrite on the plane and then submit it from the hotel, but the story needs a lot more work than I had time to give it, and I wasn't up for anything this morning other than staggering to the bed and falling unconscious.

The freelance gig did get completed, though, so that's good.

Right now, all John and I have planned is sunrise on Mt. Haleakala tomorrow morning and a luau Monday night. I intend to get rewrites of "Snowflakes" and the soon-to-be-renamed "Putting Down Roots" while I'm here, as well as do some read-throughs and critiques I've promised. Which should be very easily accomplished, as we don't plan to overstuff our week on Maui with stress and events.

Vacation rocks. So long as the rock isn't on fire.

I'm afraid the rewrite of "Snowflakes" isn't ready to be submitted today. Haven't even finished the new draft type-in, so I can't even update the word count. Just as well; I really ought to order the latest issue of Farthing before I try to submit. Best practice and all.

Still, slight disappointment. The story was so clear while I was just thinking about it. Once I got into the rewrite, it sorta... muddled. I'd try to address a problem one of the critiques pointed out, and I'd find myself adding like three paragraphs of highly suspect first draft. Then I'd try rewriting something no one else had a problem with, because I didn't know whether I liked it better with the adverbial phrase up front or at the back of the sentence.

And I expect to be able to do this with novels?

Well. I shall be out of town this weekend--going to Seattle mainly for my sister-in-law's housewarming party and additionally to catch up with friends old and new. I'll be heading to the airport in about an hour. For once, I'm not bringing my laptop with me--or my husband's laptop, whatever--so there will be no weekend bloggity. There will be story revision, but it'll be the old fashioned way: pen, ink, paper, print-outs. Hopefully there will be something to submit, somewhere, come Monday.

Ta-ta fer now.

The story workshopped Saturday has been committed to email as of nine hours ago. As for myself, I am in the Emeryville train station, ready to be committed to rail in about an hour.

Before leaving San Francisco, before finishing and emailing my story, before sitting around half the night in the Hospitality Suite at the Dead Dog Party knitting and watching Adult Swim, I actually got out of the hotel for a bit. I started out by asking the hotel staff, "How do I get to an Amtrak bus stop tomorrow morning?" Oddly enough, the staff member seemed aware only of the Ferry Building stop, and the only way he seemed to know how to get me there was allll the way down Van Ness on a southbound #47 to Market Street, and then alll the way back over on the Market Street cable car, forming a nice big "V" shape over the map of downtown San Francisco in doing so.

"What about Pier 39?" I asked, because Amtrak's pamphlet showed it would pick up passengers there too, and the northbound #47 bus would go right there. Believe me, with my luggage, I didn't want any more transfer points than were strictly necessary.

"Look, all you need to do is get to the Ferry Building, see?" He redrew the "V" shape. "Like that."

"And there's no route to just get me there straight?" I drew a line across the top of the "V" from the circle he'd drawn at the Holiday Inn to the circle he'd drawn at the Ferry Building. The line that capped the "V" went along a street I'd become familiar with, California, as I'd taken the #1 bus along it to the hotel on Thursday morning after checking out of the Green Tortoise Adventure Hostel. It was one of the cross streets that demarcated the block containing the Holiday Inn. "Nothing runs directly along California between here and there?"

"Not that I know of!" he said cheerfully.

I was doubtful. I decided to scout things out for myself. I took the northbound #47 up to Pier 39 / Fisherman's Wharf, found the Amtrak bus stop there, and said to myself, "A-ha!" Then I commenced to putter. I was at Pier 39, after all. There were supposedly all sorts of fun things here. Restaurants, and candy, and an arcade, and a merry-go-round, and seals! Well, actually, sea lions, you can tell the difference because they're smarter and have visible ear flaps and so forth, but--seals!!!! Like fifty or sixty of 'em, laying out on the platforms between the piers and barking at each other and scritching themselves behind the ears with their foot-like flippers and lounging with their furry bellies in the air and--wow! Sea lions. Dude.

Then I figured I'd just walk along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building. It was good exercise and pretty too. I located the Amtrak stop there as well, ate an Ahi sandwich and worked on the workshopped story at a restaurant in the Ferry Building, and finally turned inland to get on the Market Street cable car.

And then I found out that there is a public transit route that caps the damn "V" that the hotel staff member drew. I found the damn rout that runs right along California. It's the California cable car, duh, and it runs practically from the Ferry Building right out to Van Ness and then stops.

Rather a convenient line of public transportation for the hotel staff to be completely unaware of, don't you think?

At this point in the narration, the author pauses to regale you with a nightmare. I don't have many nightmares. When I do, they tend to fall into one of a handful of categories. There's the airplane or car trouble dream, in which I can't brake or steer or land worth a damn--I had one of those Sunday morning, finding myself awakening at the controls of a Boeing 757 which I had absolutely no training to handle or certification to pilot and which my husband was steering within mere feet of the water. I had to grab the yoke to force us into a wings-a-tilt position so we'd fit underneath a bridge coming straight up. "Why are you flying so close to the water?" I screeched; "Because I'm more comfortable there," he said. I corrected this as soon as I could, but we were not in VFR conditions and I didn't know what to do other than land and wait for help. I later told the jet pilot who came to take the plane home, "Really, I swear, I just sort of woke up in the cockpit. I don't know how I got there."

So that's the vehicle trouble dream. It used to take place in cars, but now it almost exclusively takes place in airplanes because, well, piloting stresses me out more.

Then there's the nightmare of pursuit in which some monstrous person or thing chases me at a walking speed, knowing I can run but I can't hide. That one has happened only very, very rarely since I got into my 20s.

And the nightmare of being unprepared for school happens fairly frequently. It almost always puts me back in high school, not college. I've heard others say the same. We form more of a stressy connection with the school our parents chose, maybe, than with the school we chose to escape to. Or maybe high school is more grounded in the subconscious, being usually in our home neighborhoods and associated with rites of passage like the sweet sixteen, learning to drive, and so forth.

Well, you probably recognize all those dreams. Especially the school one. And you'll probably recognize this one, too: the nightmare of falling. Only when I have it, it's special. It's quite precise. It very rarely involves a straight freefall; instead, it begins on an inclined plane. And I'm in a vehicle of some sort: a roller coaster, a car, a bus, maybe even a waterslide. And I am going down or up a very steep incline, so very steep and increasingly so that inevitably my vehicle's wheels (or, in the case of the waterslide, my butt cheeks) lose contact with the road (or track or slide) and begins to fall as though the plane had become perpendicular to the ground.

The entire way up Nob Hill while riding the California Street Cable Car, I kept thinking, "Greeeeat. Fresh fodder for my falling-off-an-inclined-plane nightmares. Just what I needed."

Because California Street is pretty damn steep. I'd wager 10%, some of those blocks. And the cable car is two-thirds open to the sides. My entire stay in the Holiday Inn, I'd fallen asleep and woken up staring at a Photoshop-filtered picture of people riding a San Francisco trolly (ding! ding! think Rice-a-Roni!), and I'd marvelled at the way they some of them stood on the running board and held onto the side pole as they rode. Was that allowed? Was the driver aware? Yes the driver is aware, and it is in fact expected, and it is not the norm for someone sitting on the bench in the open bit to clutch the side pole and the back of the bench with white knuckles and shaking arms as the car rides up past Chinatown.

Yes I'm a wimp. What's your point?

On my way back to the Ferry Building with luggage this morning, I sat in the enclosed section in the middle. I still did my share of white-knuckling, especially when a young lady stepped right out onto the running board in preparation for her stop about two blocks above the heart of Chinatown. I suppose people get used to the darndest things.

Hell, I suppose if I can get used to steering an airplane, or to chatting with Big Name Authors at conventions without going all "hrrrr dahhhh thhbbbb uh You Rock, Sir! i er ummm....", or with reading my own fiction aloud in front of a group of strangers (which group includes said Big Name Author(s)), other people can get used to seemingly death-defying feats such as hanging out the side of a cable car going 10 miles an hour down a 10% grade incline. Each to their own.